A New Spatiotemporal Filtering Method for Single-Trial Estimation of Correlated ERP Subcomponents

A novel spatiotemporal filtering method for single trial estimation of event-related potential (ERP) subcomponents is proposed here. Unlike some previous works in ERP estimation, the proposed method is able to estimate temporally correlated ERP subcomponents such as P3a and P3b. A new cost function is, therefore, defined which can deflate one of the correlated subcomponents. The method is applied to both simulated and real data and has shown to perform very well even in low signal-to-noise ratio situations. In addition, the method is compared to spatial principal component analysis and its superiority has been confirmed by using simulated signals. The approach can be especially useful in mental fatigue analysis where the relative variability of P300 subcomponents is the key factor in detecting the level of fatigue.